1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a method and apparatus for generating musical accompaniment signals corresponding to a musical program, more particularly to a method and apparatus which generates musical accompaniment signals at a lower storage space requirement.
2. Description of the Related Art
An apparatus capable of reproducing audio-visual signals which were recorded on a recording medium is known in the art. One example of such an apparatus is a karaoke reproducing apparatus which reproduces audio-visual musical accompaniment signals that were especially prepared for people to sing along with.
In the conventional karaoke reproducing apparatus, the musical accompaniment signals of a musical program include audio music data, video data and lyric data overlaid onto the video data. Currently, the musical accompaniment signals corresponding to one musical program are stored in a single file encoded in the Moving Picture Expert Group (MPEG) standard format. Thus, each musical program takes up a relatively large amount of storage space, thereby resulting in a relatively small number of musical programs that can be recorded on a single recording medium.
While different compression techniques, such as the MPEG Layer 3 standard compression format, are available to reduce the storage space requirement of audio music data, such compression techniques cannot be employed in the conventional karaoke reproducing apparatus in view of the fact that the musical accompaniment signals corresponding to one musical program are stored in a single file. Moreover, synchronization of the lyric data with the audio music data is not possible in the prior art if the audio music data is compressed.